Tag Archives: The Private War of J.D. Salinger

September 16, 2013 · 8:55 am

Salinger by Shane Salerno and David Shields is not so much a biography of J.D. Salinger as it is an assortment of press clips and interview excerpts about Salinger. None of the pieces are properly dated or sourced in the main text, aside from the name of the person speaking or writing, so fifty-year-old articles are lined up next to commentary from academics and the thoughts of the actor Edward Norton. Somewhere in between are words from people who actually knew Salinger. In the book’s 500-plus pages, the “authors” contribute maybe 50 pages of text.

The result is something like a J.D. Salinger Facebook news feed. This is not optimal, but it’s not the biggest problem with Salinger.

The biggest problem is that on a subject where nuance and understanding are required, Salinger is sloppy and lazy. Its flood of information ends up being a mile wide and an inch deep. Even when presenting new details that are valuable and intriguing, Salinger manages to tell a story that is less than the sum of its parts. Then there is David Shields, who I will deal with in a moment. But for these reasons and more, this is about to get ugly…

A Salinger bio is an easy thing to screw up. Fortunately, there are reasons for hope about this latest attempt…

I do, however, have one lingering worry. This worry has to do with the involvement of a writer named Paul Alexander. Alexander is a former Time reporter and a biographer who has written on subjects as wide-ranging as Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, John Kerry and Karl Rove. In 1999, he published Salinger: A Biography. Alexander is listed as “an adviser” on the forthcoming book, and his own biography is the “based on” source for the Salinger documentary. My concern is that Alexander’s book is the single worst Salinger biography around today.